After a breast cancer diagnosis that came two days before the birth of her second child, followed by chemotherapy, surgery and radiotherapy, Susanne, 43, thought the worst was over, and was preparing to go back to work. But she was unprepared for how the whole experience would leave her feeling.

"I was completely exhausted," she says. "It was a challenge to do anything. Even having a conversation like this would have taken a lot out of me.

"You expect you're going to feel pretty rubbish during the treatment, but you have this adrenaline that makes you fight through it. Then everything stops and you realise it's taken a big toll on your body."

With her family overseas, and her husband, an academic, looking after her and the two children while trying to finish a PhD, she felt she was a burden. Hardest of all was what it meant for her relationship with her older son, Karim, who was three.

"It was just awful," says Susanne. "I remembered the sort of mother I used to be, and I just wasn't that person any more. I didn't feel I was giving him what he needed – after work I lay in bed all the time, just to get some energy back. It was also about the anxiety: asking myself why I was feeling like this, would I ever be normal again?"

Three years ago, the cancer charity Macmillan Cancer Support decided it needed to address the gap in support for people like Susanne, who had gone through treatment and survived cancer, but still needed practical and emotional help.

The charity is famous for its Macmillan nurses, who support more than 2 million people living with cancer in the UK. More than 3,300 Macmillan nurses are trained to support people from the time they hear they have cancer and during treatment, and they also help family members to understand the illness and what may happen. But with more and more people surviving cancer, the charity was aware that they had needs that were beyond the remit of the nurses.

Susanne explains that once you are seen to have survived cancer, support often drops off. "Nobody asks you how things are going any more, or whether you need any help," she says.

The charity's answer was Macmillan Solutions, a scheme providing volunteers to deliver help with day-to-day tasks, and financial assistance for cleaning and gardening. For Susanne, just two hours a week made all the difference. Every Thursday, Loretta, a jewellery designer in her 50s, would help her prepare an evening meal, play with Karim, and simply chat.

"It was just nice to have somebody come over," Susanne says. "It got me back into doing things that had fallen by the wayside, like setting the table nicely and having tea and cake. It was about beginning to interact with people normally again. It felt like having a magic wand. Loretta really understood what I was going through."

Loretta, who had previously helped three friends through the illness, agrees. "There's a massive expectation that you should just get on with life, and it's totally unrealistic," she says.

An evaluation of the Manchester pilot, which has matched more than 100 volunteers with 250 people affected by cancer, found the practical support had a significant impact on beneficiaries' emotional wellbeing, as did being able to discuss their feelings with someone who wouldn't get upset as family or friends might. As a result of successful pilots in Manchester and Hampshire, Macmillan plans to create similar volunteering programmes across the UK. The charity works with three voluntary sector partners in Manchester – a church, a community association and a Chinese women's organisation – to get a wider reach of volunteers and to find the people who need the support. Volunteers from all over the city are routed through the partners for management supervision and CRB checks. The Chinese organisation says the scheme allows them to provide important information about cancer in a community where people may keep their condition secret. Though Macmillan had not set out to target people with multiple and complex needs, the evaluation found the scheme had helped this hard-to-reach "cancer underclass".

Suzanne Hindle, a Macmillan Solutions' volunteer support worker, says: "This is about finding a community solution." Many volunteers, she adds, have been affected by cancer themselves, and some people who had previously been helped by the programme are now signing up.

The philosophy of the scheme is to do whatever the person says will help them most. "We get a lot of requests for gardening," Hindle says. "It gets people down that they can't cut their lawn. You worry about what your neighbours think; you worry about your tenancy."

Other volunteers may help people who have become isolated and lost confidence, perhaps finding them new social clubs or venues to visit, and going with them until they have settled in.

Hindle has just been visiting an elderly man with terminal cancer who wants a volunteer to help his wife after his death. "He just wants someone for her to talk to," she explains. "He says she'll be in pieces." Planning before a bereavement means the volunteer can build a relationship with the person in advance.

Two years after first meeting, Loretta and Susanne count each other as friends. There is a great warmth between them as they sit – over a nicely laid tea table – remembering the early days. Loretta says she feels privileged to have been invited into the family at such a vulnerable time. "A lot of trust has to be there for them to share things with me," she says.

Recently, Susanne says, she has felt more like her old self again. "I'm getting back more of the person I used to be."